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A terrible Tuesday for Donald Trump

WASHINGTON, D.C.—It was Donald Trump who publicly tied Kentucky’s state election to himself. At an election-eve rally in Lexington on Monday, he appeared beside Matt Bevin, the Republican incumbent governor. “You’re sending a message to the rest of the country,” he said. A moment later, gesturing to the media, he said, “If you lose they’re going to say Trump suffered the greatest defeat in the history of the world. This was the greatest. You can’t let that happen to me.”

They let that happen to him.

Not that it was even the worst thing that happened to him on Tuesday. There was arguably tougher news for Trump from another election state, and much worse out of his impeachment battle, but his plea to Kentucky made what happened there stand out.

When the results came in, it appeared — pending a likely recount — that Democratic candidate Andy Beshear had won the governor’s office by a few thousand votes in the heart of Trump country, a southern state the president won by 30 points in 2016.

Bevin — who would not concede the razor-thin race even though the Democrats declared victory — had tried to tie his campaign to the mutual support between himself and Trump, and campaigned against the federal impeachment efforts. It appears that wasn’t enough.

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It’s debatable how much national significance can be read into the result. Bevin’s health care policies, fights with teachers and personal prickliness had made him deeply unpopular in some quarters, and Republicans won all the other major offices in the state. Trump is expected to win Kentucky in the 2020 election, but Tuesday’s results may say something about the size of his coattails, and the limits of what he can or cannot deliver for his allies.

The same day, also in the south, Virginia completed its gradual transformation into a southern Democratic stronghold. A state that was once reliably Republican red — and slowly became “purple” through the Obama years as its suburban demographics changed — is now definitely Democratic blue. Democrats won both houses of the state legislature and every major state office. They now control the Virginia government, and will be in charge when the state’s electoral boundaries are redrawn in 2021. Gun control and passing the Equal Rights Amendment may be on the order paper.

While Virginia’s race might have been more about demographics than Trump himself, his team cannot consider it good news.

But both of those electoral blows may have seemed minor compared to the hole Trump’s hand-picked ambassador to the European Union tore open in the president’s defence in the ongoing impeachment inquiry.

Earlier Tuesday, it was revealed that Gordon Sondland had filed an amendment to his earlier testimony to a Congressional committee. In it, Sondland now acknowledges that he believed a quid pro quo was being sought in negotiations with Ukraine — that military aid would only flow from the U.S. if Ukraine announced investigations that could benefit Trump politically. Not only did he believe that was the case, his updated testimony said, but he had directly expressed that belief to an aide to the Ukrainian president.

It was quite a reversal by Sondland, who had previously testified that he had no knowledge of a quid pro quo in the matter. It also makes Trump’s argument — that there were no conditions attached to the military aid, and that the Ukrainians didn’t even know it was being held up — just that much harder to sustain.

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No doubt he will continue to make it. In a statement Tuesday, Trump’s spokesperson maintained that there was no source cited for Sondland’s understanding of the arrangement, and that “The President has done nothing wrong.”

It was just one day in an evolving political landscape, but from Virginia to Kentucky to the hearing rooms of Washington, it was a pretty terrible Tuesday for the president.

Not the “worst defeat in the history of the world,” maybe, but an unusually bad day for a presidency that’s becoming increasingly accustomed to bad days.

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